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The Reality of Reality Television

In the world of television, a season has just passed, and another approaches. That’s right, while one batch of reality shows has come to their inevitable conclusion, another group steps in to fill the void.

Reality tv comes in a cornucopia of malevolent flavors including searching for the perfect mate, hanging with the friends your mother hates, chronicling the cheating mate (husband, wife or significant other, it’s a varied menu) and hanging with the queens (drag queens, royal weddings, whatever). Nothing is off limits if it’s on cable.

The word ‘reality’ is defined by the Miriam Webster online dictionary as: the quality or state of being real: television programming that features videos of actual occurrences (as a police chase, stunt, or natural disaster) —often used attributively .

So, reality television. It’s swiftly become a part of the modern television lexicon. Be it network or cable, a large portion of what is being regularly programmed over the airwaves, or beamed down from the fringes of the atmosphere comes to us as reality tv. And like it or not, it is here to stay.

What’s the bottom line?
Is reality tv just a portrayal of life as it happens, such as those events mentioned in the Miriam Webster definition? Or a money-making stunt for both players and networks?

Does the video chronicling of a living macrocosm, in some instances populated by the insular lives of idiotic misfits and cretins; so lacking in modesty, common sense and decency; allow it to be formally accepted as life as we know it?

Or, is each episode a portrayal of a life so far removed from reality that to call it so is nothing more than a misnomer? To be viewed as some convoluted form of modern day comic opera? Which, to say the least, is an unfair comparison to the accepted parameters of what is known as comic opera.

In other words, does watching The Bachelor, and then discussing it around the office water cooler, give it an air of legitimacy usually reserved for natural disasters and the NFL draft?

NO. A thousand times, no.

That’s a lot of hyphens!
Just because a television show is “unscripted” and craftily edited, chronicling the day-to-day comings and goings of a group of fun-loving, ethno-centric, beer-guzzling, up-chucking, chain-smoking, name-calling, hair-pulling, foul-mouthed twenty-somethings, or housewives, (or whatever the “it” demographic happens to be at the time), doesn’t make it reality.

Or right.

So let’s stop referring to it as reality television and call it what it really is, entertainment. Nope. That’s not the right word either. It’s more than a word. I’ve got it! Call it a guilty pleasure. That’s a little closer to, well, reality. I guess.

My guilty pleasure? Last Cake Standing. So what does that say about me? Oh, hell. Forget I even brought it up!